Time for Albanese to really show who’s calling Labor’s shots

Anthony Albanese at Parliament House yesterday. Picture: Kym Smith

Scott Morrison has returned to parliament a Liberal Party hero and a Prime Minister with authority.

His claim that the Coalition has a mandate for its agenda is considerable. Whether people voted for tax cuts or against tax rises is debatable and moot.

Morrison’s moral authority derives not only from winning an election that most thought he couldn’t, but from having increased the Coalition’s margin in the House and its numbers in the Senate.

Anthony Albanese on the other hand is discovering quickly just how hard it is to manage a Labor party in opposition. He leads a party deeply divided and a shadow cabinet crippled by conflicting views about what lessons should be taken from the election loss. If any.

In his first address as leader yesterday, he had to ask his caucus to stop leaking. This does not bode well for a party that is demoralised by defeat.

But it is also unsurprising. Albanese and Labor have no means by which they can move forward until they write a new narrative around which the new caucus can gravitate. But the reconstruction can’t begin until the tax issue is resolved and it is the tax issue that will define what Labor’s new narrative will be. So far Albanese has gambled that the politics of threatening to block the Coalition’s tax cuts plays better for Labor’s base than a complete capitulation.

But as convoluted as it may appear, he has no intention of being on the wrong side of history if the government gets the crossbench support it already believes it has.

To win a war a side must pick the playing field upon which it will be waged. Labor is not going to win a battle over tax cuts and Albanese knows this.

If the Coalition gets the backing of the crossbench on Thursday, Albanese will not risk Labor being exposed to daily reminders by Morrison that it tried, and failed, to deny millions of people a tax cut and risked plunging the country into recession.

The white flag will go up, and the Labor caucus can move on.

But Albanese isn’t going to do the government any favours. If Morrison can’t muster the numbers it needs from the crossbench in the Senate, Albanese will feel no obligation to give them to him.

This is where it becomes tricky for Albanese. There are those of his colleagues in the shadow cabinet who think it is madness to even have the argument. And there are clearly enough who think otherwise.

The final outcome will demonstrate who is really calling the shots within the shadow cabinet and reveal whether the old socialist grouping still holds the same influence over the leader as it did with Bill Shorten.